We’ll
learn how YP pulls massive data and information from across new and
legacy resources to report precise metrics to its advertisers, making
them more aware about their campaigns -- and how small businesses are
fairing.

Gardner:
Tell us about YP, the digital
arm of what people would have known as Yellow Pages a number of
years ago. You're all about helping small businesses become better
acquainted with their customers, and vice versa.

Theisinger: YP is a leading local marketing solutions provider in the
U.S., dedicated to helping local businesses and communities grow. We
help connect local businesses with consumers wherever they are and
whatever device they are on, desktop and mobile.

Gardner: As we know, the world has changed
dramatically around marketing and advertising and connecting buyers and
sellers. So in the digital age, being precise, being aware, being
visible is everything, and that means data. Tell us about
your data requirements in this new world.

Theisinger:
We need to be able to capture how consumers interact with our customers,
and that includes where they interact -- whether it’s a mobile device or
web device -- and also within our network of partners. We reach about 100
million consumers across the U.S and we do that through both our YP network
and our partner network.

Gardner: Tell us too
about the evolution. Obviously, you don’t build out data capabilities
and infrastructure overnight. Some things are in place, and you move on,
you learn, adapt, and you have new requirements. Tell us your data warehouse journey.

Needed to evolve

Theisinger:
Yellow Pages saw the shift of their print business moving heavily
online and becoming heavily digital. We needed to evolve with that, of
course. In doing so, we needed to build infrastructure around the
systems that we were using to support the businesses we were helping to
grow.

And
in doing that, we started to take a look at what the systems
requirements were for us to be able to report and message value to our
advertisers. That included understanding where consumers were looking,
what we were impressing to them, what businesses we were showing them
when they searched, what they were clicking on, and, ultimately what
businesses they called. We track all of those different metrics.

When
we started this adventure, we didn't have the technology and the
capabilities to be able to do those things. So we had to reinvent our
infrastructure. That’s what we did

Gardner: And
as we know, getting more information to your advertisers to help them
in their selection and spending expertise is key. It differentiates
companies. So this is a core proposition for you. This is at the heart
of your business.

Given the mission criticality, what are the
requirements? What did you need to do to get that reporting, that
warehouse capability?

Theisinger: We need to be able to scale
to the size of our network and the size of our partner network, which
means no click left behind, if you will, no impression untold, no search
unrecognized. That's billions of events we process every day. We needed
to look at something that would help us scale. If we added a new
partner, if we expanded the YP network, if we added hundreds, thousands,
tens of thousands of new advertisers, we needed the infrastructure to
able to help us do that.

We need to be able to scale to the size of our network and the size of
our partner network, which means no click left behind, if you will, no
impression untold, no search unrecognized.

Gardner: I understand that you've been using Hadoop.
You might be looking at other technologies as they emerge. Tell us
about your Hadoop experience and how that relates to your reporting
capabilities.

Theisinger: When I joined YP, Hadoop
was a heavy buzz product in the industry. It was a proven product for
helping businesses process large amounts of unstructured data.
However, it still poses a problem. That unstructured data needs to be
structured at some point, and it’s that structure that you report to
advertisers and report internally.

That's how we
decided that we needed to marry two different technologies -- one that
will allow us to scale a large unstructured processing environment like
Hadoop and one that will allow us to scale a large structured
environment like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Vertica.

Business impact

Gardner: How has this impacted your business, now that you've been
able to do this and it's been in the works for quite a while? Any
metrics of success or anecdotes that can relate back to how the people
in your organization are consuming those metrics and then extending that
as service and product back into your market? What has been the result?

Theisinger:
We have roughly 10,000 jobs that we run every day, both to
process data and also for analytics. That data represents about five to
six petabytes of data that we've been able to capture about consumers,
their behaviors, and activities. So we process that data within our
Hadoop environment. We then pass that along into HPE Vertica, structure it
in a way that we can have analysts, product owners, and other systems
retrieve it, pull and look at those metrics, and be able to report on
them to the advertisers.

Gardner:
Is there an automation to this as you look to present a more
and better analytics on top of the Vertica? What are you doing to
make that customizable to people based on their needs, but at the same
time, controlled and managed so that it doesn't become unwieldy?

Theisinger:
There is a lot of interaction between customers, both internal and
external, when we decide how and what we’re going to present in terms of
data, and there are a lot of ways we do that. We present data
externally through an advertiser portal. So we want to make sure we work
very closely with human factors and ergonomics (HFE) and the use experience (UX)
designers as well as our advertisers, through focus groups, workshops,
and understanding what they want to understand about the data that we
present them.

Then, internally, we decide what would
make sense and how we feel comfortable being able to present it to them,
because we have a universe of a lot more data than what we probably
want to show people.

We also do the same thing
internally. We've been able to provide various teams internally whether
its sales, marketing, or finance, insights into who's clicking on
various business listings, who's viewing various businesses, who’s
calling businesses, what their segmentation is, and what their
demographics look like and it allows us a lot of analytical insight. We
do most of that work through the analytics platforms, which is, in this
case, HPE Vertica.

Small businesses need to be able to just pick up their mobile device and look at the effectiveness of their campaigns with YP.

Gardner:
Now, that user experience is becoming more and more important. It
wasn't that long ago when these reports were going to people who were
data scientists or equivalent, but now we're taking the amount to those
600,000 small businesses. Can you tell us a little bit about lessons
learned when it comes to delivering an end analytics product, versus
building out the warehouse? They seem to be interdependent but we're
seeing more and more emphasis on that user experience these days.

Theisinger:
You need to bridge the gap between analytics and just data storage and
processing. So you have to present them in-state. This is what happens.
It’s very descriptive of what's going on, and we try to be a little bit
more predictive when it comes to the way we want to do analysis at YP.
We're looking to go beyond just descriptive analytics.

What
has also changed is the platform by which you present the data. It's
going highly mobile. Small businesses need to be able to just pick up
their mobile device and look at the effectiveness of their campaigns
with YP. They're able to do that through a mobile platform we’ve built
called YP for Merchants.

They can log in and see their
metrics that are core to their business and how those campaigns are
performing. They can even see some details, like if they missed a phone
call and they want to be able to reach back out to a consumer and see if
they need to help, solve a problem, or provide a service.

Developer perspective

Gardner:
And given that your developers had to go through the steps of creating
that great user experience and taking it to the mobile tier, was there
anything about HPE Vertica, your warehouse, or your approach to analytics
that made that development process easier? Is there an approach to
delivering this from a developer perspective that you think others might
learn from?

Theisinger: There is, and it takes a
lot more people than just the analytics team in my group or the
engineers in my team. It’s a lot of other teams within YP that build
this. But first and foremost, people want to see the data as real time
and as near real time as they can.

When a small
business relies on contact from customers, we track those calls. When a
potential customer calls a small business and that small business isn’t
able to actually get to the call or respond to that customer because
maybe they are on a job, it's important to know that that call happened
recently. It's important for that small business to reach back out to
the consumer, because that consumer could go somewhere else and get that
service from a competitor.

To be able to do that as
quickly as possible is a hard-and-fast requirement. So processing the
data as quickly as you can and presenting that, whether it be on a
mobile device, in this case, as quickly as you can is definitely
paramount to making that a success.

Having the right infrastructure puts you in the position to be able to
do that. That’s where businesses are going to end up growing, whether
it's ours or small businesses.

Gardner:
I've spoken to a number of people over the years and one of the
takeaways I get is that infrastructure is destiny. It really seems to be
the case in your business that having that core infrastructure decision
process done correctly has now given you the opportunity to scale up,
be innovative, and react to the market. I think it’s also telling that,
in this data-driven decade that we’ve been in for a few years now, the
whole small business sector of the economy is a huge part of our overall
productivity and growth as an economy.

Any thoughts,
generally about making infrastructure decisions for the long run,
decisions you won't regret, decisions that that can scale over time and
are future proof?

Theisinger: Yeah, for speaking
about what I've seen through the job that we’ve had it here at YP, we
reach over half a million paying advertisers. The shift is happening
between just telling the advertisers what's happened to helping them
actually drive new business.

So it's around the fact
that I know who my customers are now, how do I find more of them, or how
do I reach out to them, how do I market to them? That's where the real
shift is. You have to have a really strong scalable and extensible
platform to be able to answer that
question. Having the right infrastructure puts you in the position to be
able to do that. That’s where businesses are going to end up growing,
whether it's ours or small businesses.

And our success
is hinged to whether or not we can get these small businesses to grow.
So we are definitely 100 percent focused on trying to make that happen.

Gardner:
It’s also telling that you’ve been able to adjust so rapidly.
Obviously, your business has been around for a long time. People are
very familiar with the Yellow Pages, the actual physical product, but
you've gone to make software so core to your value and your
differentiation. I'm impressed and I commend you on being able to make
that transitions fairly rapidly.

Core talent

Theisinger:
Yeah, well thank you. We’ve invested a lot in the people within the
technology team we have there in Glendale. We've built our own internal
search capabilities, our own internal products. We’ve pulled a lot of
good core talent from other companies.

I used to work
at Yahoo with other folks, and YP is definitely focused on trying to
make this transition a successful one, but we have our eye on our
heritage. Over a hundred years of being very successful in the print
business is not something you want to turn your back on. You want to be
able to embrace that, and we’ve learned a lot from it, too.

So
we're right there with small businesses. We have a very large sales
force, which is also very powerful and helpful in making this transition
a success. We've leaned on all of that and we become one big kind of
happy family, if you will. We all worked very closely together to make
this transition successful.

Gardner: I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been
learning about how Yellow Pages, or YP, has experimented with and built
out a full enterprise data warehouse capability, built with also
powerful near real-time reporting capabilities. We've heard why pulling
massive data and information from across new and legacy sources is
essential to be able to report precise metrics to YP’s advertisers, and
how that's differentiating the company in the new world of online
marketing and advertising.

So join me in extending a
big thank you to Bill Theisinger, Vice President of
Engineering for Platform Data Services at YP. Thank you.

Theisinger: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate the time.

Gardner:
And a big thank you also to our audience for joining us for this Big
Data innovation case study discussion. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for
this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for
listening, and do come back next time.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Yellow Pages help small businesses
attract, reach out to, and retain customers using big data. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.